Red, Yellow, and Blue, by Orly Genger, at Madison Square Park in New York

From Antony Gormley’s 31 cast-iron figures ominously looming over Madison Square Park in 2010 to Leo Villareal’s LED-infused Buckyball sculpture flashing 16 million colors this past winter, the Mad. Sq. Art program consistently delivers the most cutting-edge public-art offerings in the country. This summer New York–based artist Orly Genger will install Red, Yellow, and Blue, three expansive undulating walls of painted hand-knotted nautical rope. (The artist employed enough rope to span the length of the island of Manhattan nearly 20 times over.) The piece is a nod to Barnett Newman’s “Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue” (1966–70), a series of four vibrantly colored paintings, two of which were vandalized at exhibitions.

William Turnbull exhibition, at Chatsworth in Derbyshire, England

Before the Scottish sculptor William Turnbull died last November, at the age of 90, he had been approached by the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire about doing a show at Chatsworth, their Derbyshire, England, estate. “Bill was still in very good health, so we had no idea it would become a posthumous exhibition,” says his son Alex Turnbull, who helped curate the exhibition with Yorkshire Sculpture Park’s Clare Lilley and Peter Murray. The show is a cross section of the artist’s six-decade career, including early figures and totems and a selection of steel works from the mid-1960s, as well as some of the elder Turnbull’s more refined later sculptures. “Chatsworth House and its grounds are a challenging space to curate, due to their sheer scale,” Alex says. While monumental pieces like Large Blade Venus and Horse are set in front of the Baroque palace, Lilley and Murray made use of less frequently traveled sites on the property as well, so they could be “chanced upon or discovered, almost like a journey,” Alex explains. “I’ve seen the work displayed in a variety of settings, but it was very satisfying to see it in such a grand environment.”

The Shed, by Haworth Tompkins, at the National Theatre of Great Britain in London

As part of its more than $100 million redevelopment program, London’s National Theatre tapped local firm Haworth Tompkins Architects to develop a temporary structure, dubbed the Shed, to replace the closed Cottesloe Theatre, which the firm is currently redesigning. “It was a way for [the theatre company] to play with new kinds of work and to do shorter runs,” says the firm’s lead architect, Paddy Dillon. The award-winning indie musical Mission Drift will take place in the venue from June 5 through 28, and British electronic-music pioneer Matthew Herbert will perform The Hush there in July. The 250-seat wood box is composed of rough-sawn boards, and its four chimneys naturally ventilate the inside with help from grates under the stage. As for the exterior’s high-wattage hue, Dillon explains, “It’s a festival building, and it’s somehow painting the town red.”

Mobile Homestead, by Mike Kelley, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit

Before his untimely death 16 months ago, Detroit native Mike Kelley was one of the most successful artists living in Los Angeles, but in many ways his work always reflected his Motor City roots. “A lot of his art came out of growing up here—it was kind of a love-hate relationship,” says Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit founding director Marsha Miro. Kelley’s installation Mobile Homestead, an exact replica of the artist’s childhood home in Westland, Michigan, will serve as a visitors center and library on the museum’s campus. The sculpture comprises a movable section that will travel to local schools and a permanent (and private) portion that will also include subterranean work spaces for visiting artists. “There are no windows, no doors, the ceiling heights are all different—I think the idea of working in this strange space is what interested Mike, and I think it’ll interest a lot of other artists,” Miro says. “Who knows what they’ll do?”

Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2013, by Sou Fujimoto Architects in London

At 41, Sou Fujimoto is the youngest architect ever invited to design a temporary structure for the annual pavilion at Kensington Garden’s Serpentine Gallery, which in previous years has served as a canvas for such top-notch names as Toyo Ito, Frank Gehry, and Zaha Hadid, who received the inaugural commission in 2000. The Japanese-born Fujimoto, celebrated for his bright, organically inspired structures—including his all-white, en-plein-air House N and the bookshelf-lined Musashino Art University Museum & Library, both in Japan—has chosen an even lighter approach for his 3,800-square-foot latticelike pavilion. Devised of .79-inch-thick white steel poles, the semitransparent installation will include a café and multilevel terraces for extra seating, which, Fujimoto explains, will allow visitors to stay dry while being “suspended in space.”

He, by Bam!, at MAXXI in Rome

MAXXI, Rome’s National Museum of the 21st Century Arts, is going kinetic. The Turin-based architecture collaborative Bam! (Bottega di Architettura Metropolitana) designed the installation He, an almost 30-foot-tall semitransparent helium-filled yellow balloon that will hover above the museum’s piazza, moving according to the wind and casting a shadow on the grounds. “The Maxxi is a massive structure, so we wanted to respond to that massiveness with something light, and also to create contrast with the surface of the concrete walls,” says Bam! spokesperson Simona Della Rocca. During the day, water will pour down the installation, producing a refreshing oasis on the 1,300-square-foot wood platform below, while at night the piece will be illuminated like a giant floating lantern. “Using shape, water, and volume, we’re making something that will interact like a person,” says Della Rocca.

"Thomas Houseago: As I Went Out One Morning" at Storm King Art Center in Mountainville, New York

Spread over 500 wooded acres along the lower Hudson Valley, the Storm King Art Center in Mountainville, New York, counts more than 100 outdoor sculptures from art icons like Louise Bourgeois, Donald Judd, and Richard Serra among its collection. This season, Los Angeles–based sculptor Thomas Houseago, best known for his raw, lo-fi representational pieces made of plaster, delivers his first large-scale exhibition in the U.S. to date, featuring 11 sculptures that trace his outdoor works from 2007 to 2013. "I think it'll be interesting for people to see his relationship with modernism, because at Storm King he'll be positioned with Calders in the background," says the center's associate curator Nora Lawrence, noting that Houseago's eight-foot-tall owl was given a black-green patina in tribute to a David Smith piece on the grounds. Elsewhere, thronelike chairs made from rebar, hemp, and plaster dot the lush landscape. Designed to weather, they're also meant for sitting on, says Lawrence: "So make use of them."

The City is Wilder than You Think..., by Robert Montgomery, in Berlin

Scottish artist Robert Montgomery is best known for his overtly political billboards—recent projects include pieces in support of the Occupy movement and the Stop the War Coalition campaign—which makes the artist’s latest installation in Berlin something of a departure. “I usually do work that’s against something, but this is more positive,” Montgomery says of The City Is Wilder Than You Think and Kinder Than You Think (Recycled Sunlight Poem), 2011, a nearly ten-by-20-foot LED sign located in a city section known as the Holzmarkt and overlooking the space that once housed the legendary underground club Bar 25. “I want to celebrate this city—Berlin is a place of healing and regeneration and creativity. The work is about the way the city is at once an outdoor and indoor space, both a landscape and a house, and that feeling of it being a place where all are protected against the wild.”

Party Wall, by Caroline O’Donnell, at MoMA PS1 in Long Island City, New York

After taking into account seating, shade, and water—the key considerations for MoMA PS1’s annual Young Architects Program series of competitions—Ithaca, New York–based designer Caroline O’Donnell of CODA decided to turn things upside down—literally. “We took a canopy and rotated it 90 degrees,” says O’Donnell, whose winning design, Party Wall, a canted word-based structure consisting of wood cutouts donated by an eco-friendly skateboard company, is meant to echo the graffiti and billboards found throughout Long Island City. O’Donnell also managed to include a misting station, removable benches, a cinema screen, and platforms for catwalks, lectures, and even a wedding (the nuptials will be between O’Donnell’s project leader and a team member, who got engaged during the competition). “One of the really fun things is that people wonder if it says something,” remarks O’Donnell. Spoiler alert: At the right time of day, the structure casts a shadow on the ground that spells out, appropriately enough, wall.

Mark’s House, by Two Islands, in Flint, MI

Flint, Michigan, has the unfortunate distinction of being both an epicenter of the American housing crisis and the most dangerous city in the U.S., so the town could use something to cheer about this summer. Cue Mark’s House, winner of Flint Public Art Project’s inaugural “Flat Lot” design-build competition. Dreamed up by the London-based design collaborative Two Islands, the mirrored Tudor-style abode—which appears to float above a downtown parking lot—represents the foreclosed home of fictional Michigander Mark Hamilton. “It highlights the footprint of something that’s somehow left you, but it’s temporal, ethereal,” Two Islands partner William Villalobos says of the firm’s first realized project. “And that’s the feeling you get when you lose a house full of memories.”